A true neurologist must regard himself as something more than a physician.  He needs be a good preacher, an astute man of the world, as well as something of a lawyer.  The patient expects counsel of an intimate kind, expects aid in the most difficult situations, viz., the conflicts of health and ethics.

Mrs. A.R., thirty-one years of age and very attractive, has been married since the age of eighteen.  She has two children, and her husband, ten years her senior, is a man of whose character she says, “Every one thinks he is perfect.”  A little overstaid and over dignified, inclined to be pompous and didactic, he is kind-hearted and loyal, and successful in a small business.  He is an immigrant Swiss and she is American born, of Swiss parentage.

Always romantic, Mrs. A.R. became greatly dissatisfied with her home life.  At times the whole scheme of things, matrimony, settled life, got on her nerves so that she wanted to scream.  She was bored, and it seemed to her that soon she would be old without ever having really lived.  “I married before I had any fun, and I haven’t had any fun since I married except”—­Except for the incident that broke down her health by swinging her into mental channels that made her long for the quiet domesticity against which she had so rebelled.  Her daydreaming was erotic, but romantically so, not realistic.

There are in the community adventurers of both sexes whose main interest in life is the conquest of some woman or man.  The male sex adventurers are of two main groups, a crude group whose object is frank possession and a group best called sex-connoisseurs, who seek victims among the married or the hitherto virtuous; who plan a campaign leisurely and to whom possession must be preceded by difficulties.  Frequently these gentry have been crude, but as satiation comes on a new excitement is sought in the invasion of other men’s homes.  Undoubtedly they have a philosophy of life that justifies them.

Since this is not a novel we may omit the method by which one of these men found his way to the secret desires of our patient, and how he proceeded to develop her dissatisfaction into momentary physical disloyalty.  She came out of her dereliction dazed; could it be she who had done this, who had descended into the vilest degradation?  She broke off all relations with the man, probably much to his surprise and disgust, and plunged into a self-accusatory internal debate that brought about a profound neurasthenia.

Naturally she did not of her own accord speak of her unfaithfulness,—­largely because no one knew of it.  Her husband did not in the least suspect her; he thought she needed a rest, a change, little realizing how “change” had broken her down. (For after all, the most of infidelity is based on a sort of curiosity, a seeking of a new stimulus, rather than true passion.) The truth was forced out of her when it was evident to me that something was obsessing her.